Add Community Forums to Your Intercom Messenger
If you're using Intercom as your help desk solution and are wondering whether you can add community forums directly to your messenger, the answer is yes - with the right integration. While Intercom doesn't offer a native forum feature, Turf enables you to embed community functionalities seamlessly into your Intercom messenger widget.
1. Benefits of Bringing Your Community Inside Your Intercom Messenger
When you integrate a community platform directly into your SaaS product, you're not just adding a forum - you're creating a hub where customers can connect, share insights, troubleshoot together, and feel genuinely invested in your product.
Integrating your community inside your Intercom Messenger allows your users to use your community directly in any page that they are on in your product. Your community is present everywhere and it only takes one-click to open the Intercom widget and start participating. This is lowest barrier to entry and most frictionless approach possible.
Integrating your community inside your Intercom Messenger can lead to a 70% increase in community posts and discussions.
This kind of integrated community experience drives some impressive outcomes: companies report up to a 54% reduction in support costs and 47% increase in customer engagement, when customers can find answers from each other. The more community activity, the better these business impact metrics will be. Instead of directing users to external platforms like Facebook groups or standalone forums, you keep everything under one roof - strengthening brand loyalty and making the experience seamless.
2. Install Turf from the Intercom App Store
The most straightforward way to add community forums to Intercom is through Turf's official integration, available in the Intercom App Store. This integration allows you to embed a fully-featured community forum directly inside your Intercom messenger, so users can browse discussions, create posts, and engage with other customers without leaving the chat window.
Turf provides embeddable community forum software designed specifically for SaaS companies, with features like voting, gamification, member segmentation, roadmap & feedback boards, courses, and more. The integration is seamless: once installed, your customers can access community forums through the messenger home screen, making it easy to deflect support tickets and foster peer-to-peer engagement.
3. Use SSO for Seamless User Experience
Intercom's Messenger allows you to customize the home screen with apps from its marketplace. After installing Turf's community platform, navigate to your Messenger settings and select "Customize Home with apps." From there, add the installed "Turf: Community forum" app to make it visible to users as soon as they open the messenger.
This setup creates a native feel for community forum participation, integrating community features alongside your help articles and other support resources, improving customer self-service and engagement.
3. Use SSO for Seamless User Experience
Single Sign-On (SSO) allows your customers and users to access the community without needing separate logins. Syncing user data from your app to Turf is a must have so members are automatically authenticated when they access community forum features within the Intercom Messenger.
SSO also helps you restrict access to specific user segments or app customers, ensuring privacy and relevant segmentation for your community discussions.
Here's a full comprehensive guide on how to setup SSO between Turf and your application.
4. Request a Demo of Turf
Whether you already have a community environment and want to integrate it into Intercom to improve community activity & engagement, or are starting from scratch and are looking to boost customer engagement, deflect support tickets, increase user acquisition - adding community forums to your Intercom messenger is a powerful strategy.
The easiest path is through a dedicated integration like Turf, which combines forum functionalities with the convenience of your existing Intercom Messenger - no complex setup required.
If you'd like to see what community forums in your Intercom Messenger would look like, feel free to request a demo of Turf here.
